ICOM Productions (ICOM) is a North American leader in developing custom eLearning solutions for enterprise-level companies. Through its custom eLearning service work, ICOM had, over the years, developed a raw eLearning authoring and LMS platform combination used to power custom client projects totalling over a million users, including industry giants such as FedEx, WestJet, McDonald’s and many more.

However, this platform was uniquely configured for individual client needs and not designed to be scalable, stand-alone software that could compete globally with existing commercial SaaS eLearning authoring products.

The new product needed to be re-designed, packaged, re-priced and promoted as a competitive solution to a broader range of clients outside of existing custom-service clients.

But where to start? We would need to answer:

• What are the target user pain points not met by existing solutions?
• Positioning: Where’s the competitive white space, and what’s the unique value proposition for the new product?
• How should the new product be priced?
• How can ICOM become a solution-based company with a sustainable process for creating licensable products?
• How to do this with a limited product development budget and rationed staff resources?
• What about branding and marketing?

Afdonex and ICOM approached this project as if it were a brand-new SaaS product being created. Strong product planning set the foundation for a successful project.

We started by talking to target users about their jobs-to-be-done and the workflow and pain points associated with that. We would use the information pulled from these conversations, combined with ICOM’s experience on hundreds of eLearning projects, to begin populating a Lean Canvas business model focused on determining the ideal product-market fit for this re-engineered product. A deep analysis of the competition, including product testing, was also done. This competitive analysis, combined with user feedback, helped us determine the Ideal white space for our product and pricing for this product.

Afdonex undertook an in-depth UI/UX review of the existing product and provided feedback to the development team. Afdonex captured and combined this information and the users’ needs into a product roadmap and backlog development list. Afdonex helped focus the dev team on the idea that everything they did had to make the customer experience faster and easier. ICOM’s Director of Products embraced this philosophy, resulting in a complete re-design of the user experience.

Because ICOM concurrently operates a bustling client service business, resources were very tight for this “non-core” project. To create efficiency, the concept of agile development was introduced to ICOM by Afdonex and effectively adopted, allowing the product to be affordably built incrementally and with continuous user feedback. The team then stretched time and dollars by executing prioritized re-design and development aspects of the user experience over one year.

As part of this project, Afdonex also delivered a high-level product/marketing strategy to ICOM to serve as a foundation for taking the product to market. As ICOM did not have its own internal brand and marketing resources available to apply to this project, Afdonex coordinated selecting a quality Calgary marketing agency (Everbrave) to work on the naming, branding, content strategy and ongoing management of marketing campaigns for the new SaaS product we now call Breaze.